Intuitive eating coach Daxle Collier shares how food insecurity affected her relationship with food, how a series of health problems led her down the path of restrictive dieting, how she got back in touch with her intuition, why perfectionism around food is so destructive, and lots more.

Daxle Collier is an intuitive eating coach who helps people heal their relationship with food and create an authentic self-care practice. She offers remote coaching, online courses, and local San Francisco Bay Area workshops.

Daxle blogs about intuitive eating, mindful eating, self-care, joyful movement, stress reduction, and the process of change. Her work is rooted in mindfulness, self-compassion, and the HAES principles.

She holds a masters in health education with specialization in nutrition from John F. Kennedy University, and has also completed Intuitive Eating Counselor Certification, Training and Supervision with Evelyn Tribole and Coach Training with Linda Bark of Wisdom of the Whole Coaching Academy. Find her online at DaxleCollier.com, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

We Discuss:

• Daxle’s relationship with food growing up, which included having a mother who was a chronic dieter, an early intuitive relationship with food despite surrounding influences, and an eventual tumultuous relationship with food that began in her teenage years

• How Daxle used food and exercise to rebel and to fit in with her friends at school

• Daxle’s experience with food when she transitioned to college, including exploring vegetarianism and trying to learn how to cook and buy groceries for herself with limited means

• Medical issues that cropped up for Daxle, which created a complicated relationship with Western medicine and eventually influenced her to explore alternative and holistic health

• Daxle’s education in “functional nutrition,” including experimenting with the Paleo diet and eventually realizing that this diet was worsening her health

• The ways in which American culture encourages suffering around our health

• The danger of experimenting on ourselves with nutrition, and how easy it is to convince ourselves that certain food choices are the “magic bullet” to health, even when we are experiencing the opposite

• Daxle’s journey to intuitive eating, including her experience doing the counselor training with Evelyn Tribole

• How being in the Health at Every Size bubble can make us forget that intuitive eating and HAES aren’t the norm in the medical community and our culture as a whole

• The ways in which learning about mindfulness, self-compassion, and intuition outside of our relationships to food can open us up to the world of intuitive eating

• How important it is to break down our ideas and assumptions about foods in relation to the diet mentality before we jump into intuitive eating so that we can experience foods in an untainted, non-diet-centric way

• Daxle’s job as a wellness coach, which does not include telling people what to eat

• Why intuitive eating is not the “hunger and fullness” diet

• How to not turn self-care into self-punishment

• Daxle’s experience with peer support and how her classmates helped facilitate her journey through intuitive eating

• Daxle’s emergence into the professional world as a health coach, including how she started her own business, and how difficult it can be to market in a world dominated by diet culture

• The struggles of intuitive eating and letting go of weight loss in our fat-phobic, health-centric society

• The problem with encouraging the idea that individual health is a personal responsibility, rather than considering the influences and social-justice issues that impact individual health

• Daxle’s current relationship with food and her body, including the peace she’s found and the social media cleansing she has had to do

• The question of body love versus body acceptance, especially in the face of chronic pain or disability, and choosing body trust over body hate

• The systemic issues that create health problems

• Daxle’s dream of intuitive eating and HAES eventually being the norm rather than progressive

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